THE MID-CAREER BLIND SPOT
How to Translate Leadership Vision into Concrete Initiatives
A reflection on a competency nobody teaches — and most organisations desperately need.
The Room Full of Inspired People Who Left Empty-Handed
Picture a typical leadership offsite in corporate IT company. Two days. Scenic serene hotel, good food, a CEO who is genuinely compelling. The strategy deck is polished. The vision is real and exciting: We’ll be the most trusted digital partner in our markets, customer-obsessed, future-ready, and built on a culture of excellence”. Heads nod. Energy in the room is tangible.
You drive home inspired. Three pages of notes, scribbled quotes, arrows, and circled phrases. A sense that something important was said and you were part of it.
Then Monday arrives. Your task list from before the offsite event is still waiting
Your team asks: “So what are we actually doing differently?” And you pause — not because you didn’t listen, but because you cannot, cleanly and confidently, connect what you heard to what your team should build next. The inspiration is real. The translation is missing.
This is not a story about poor leadership or a bad strategy. This is a story about a gap that goes largely unnamed in organisations — and it quietly derails more careers and transformations than most people would admit. I have watched this happen in organisations across financial services, technology, and global services — across continents and across seniority levels. Capable, experienced, genuinely committed managers across ranks walking out of strategy sessions carrying ambition they cannot operationalise, myself being in same bracket on more occasions than I would remember. It is one of the most common and least-discussed failure modes in large organisations.
And recently on 29th January, 2026, when PeopleCert1 published the new ITIL version 5, that included a new enhanced ITIL Car Rental (ICR) Case Study as part of the learning material, it resurfaced this question that stayed with me for years - this gap of ability in managers to interpret and translating vision into actionable initiatives: why does nobody explicitly teach this competency to senior managers and future leaders? Why is vision-to-initiative translation assumed, rather than trained?
Vision Consumption Is Not the Same as Vision Translation
Most senior IT leaders are excellent vision consumers. They can synthesise complex strategic language, identify themes, read the subtext between slides, and leave a boardroom with a coherent picture of organisational intent. At senior manager levels and above, that is expected — it is not the differentiator.
The differentiator is what happens next. Vision translation is the discipline of taking aspirational language and decomposing it into specific, resourced, time-bound initiatives that a team can actually execute. It is the bridge between the boardroom and the backlog. And research is remarkably consistent on this point: that bridge is, in most organisations, structurally weak.
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes, and Charles Sull, in their landmark 2015 Harvard Business Review study "Why Strategy Execution Unravels — and What to Do About It2," surveyed more than 400 companies and nearly 8,000 managers. One of their most striking findings: only 28% of senior executives and middle managers responsible for executing strategy could list even their company's three strategic priorities. Not translate them. Not decompose them. Simply list them. HBR also found that only one in eight leaders could translate their organisation's strategy into concrete day-to-day actions. The execution gap, they concluded, is not primarily a planning problem — it is a communication and translation problem, concentrated precisely in the middle management layer.
Robert Kaplan and David Norton, the architects of the Balanced Scorecard, named this layer explicitly in their 2005 HBR piece "The Office of Strategy Management3." Their argument was blunt: strategy formulated at the top of an organisation routinely dies between the executive floor and the operational layer — not because the strategy is bad, but because there is no systematic mechanism for translating it. John Kotter, whose research on change leadership has spanned three decades, estimates that 70% of transformation programmes fail to meet their objectives — and consistently cites the absence of sustained operational translation as a primary cause.
Pfeffer and Sutton called it the "knowing-doing gap4" in their 2000 book of the same name: organisations that understand what needs to happen but systematically fail to convert that understanding into action. And if you think they were writing about the 1990s, hear this: Survey on strategy execution repeatedly found that 70% of transformation programmes fail5 to meet their objectives — and poor translation of strategy into operational priorities was cited as a primary cause in the majority of cases. The gap has not narrowed.
The strategy-execution gap is not a planning failure. It is a translation
failure — and it lives precisely at the level where this article's readers sit.
Why This Gap Persists at Exactly the Level Where It Shouldn't
This is the part that needs to be said honestly. The translation gap is not a junior problem. Junior team members are not expected to decompose board-level vision — that is not their job. The gap lives at Senior manager, director, , and head-of-function level, which is precisely why it is so damaging when it goes unaddressed. These are the people whose job it literally is to make strategy operational.
So why does it persist among capable, experienced professionals?
First: the implicit belief that strategy interpretation belongs upstairs. A significant number of senior managers carry an unspoken assumption that real strategy work happens at the C-suite level, and their job is to receive and execute — not to interpret and translate. So when a CIO says, "we need to be trusted and future-ready," the director nods and waits for someone above them to clarify what that means for their domain. That clarification rarely comes, because the C-suite assumes the translation has already happened. Nobody is lying or being negligent. The system simply has a gap where a competency should be.
Second: years of being rewarded for execution, not interpretation. Most people at mid/senior management level got there by delivering — projects on time, teams well managed, operational problems solved. Those skills are genuinely valuable. But they are downstream of translation. The muscle for working upstream — from ambiguous aspiration to structured initiative — was never systematically developed, because nobody needed it at the previous level. And now it is needed, and it was never built.
Third: organisational cultures that quietly punish initiative misalignment. In many large organisations, especially MNCs6 and GCCs7 , — there is an unspoken rule: do not invest resources in something that turns out not to be what leadership wanted. The cost of misinterpreting the vision feels greater than the cost of waiting. So the default becomes caution. Alignment meetings multiply. Managers wait for more clarity that never arrives. Nothing gets built. The transformation clock keeps ticking.
Fourth, and specific to GCC and shared services environments: the vision arrives from a parent organisation geographically and contextually distant from the delivery reality. What "customer-centric" means for the global product organisation in Seattle translates differently — and requires active interpretation — for a delivery and operations function in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, or Warsaw. The translation challenge is compounded by an authority gap: does the local director have the mandate to interpret and act, or must they wait for the Global Process Owner, the regional CIO, or the steering council? In many GCCs, that question is never formally answered. Which means it is effectively answered as "wait."
Stanford's work on organisational execution, particularly through its Graduate School of Business research on strategic alignment, identifies a fifth factor: the absence of a shared translation language between the C-suite and the operational leadership layer. Visions are articulated in the language of outcomes and aspiration. Initiatives need to be specified in the language of capabilities, resources, and metrics. Most organisations have no formal bridge between these two vocabularies. Nobody teaches the bridge. Nobody trains people to build it.
The ITIL Car Rental (ICR): The Case Study That Made It Visible
Recently working through the ITIL version 5 curriculum as a Master Trainer — specifically its central case study of ITIL Car Rental (ICR), a fictitious but richly detailed mobility company built as a worked example throughout the official framework — I found myself watching something I had seen many times in real organisations but had never seen rendered this cleanly.
ICR's new CIO, Max, arrives with a genuine vision. In his own words: "Customers want seamless and immediate access to rental services from their smartphones, as well as innovation as part of their daily lives. Autonomous vehicles are the future. My vision is for ICR to pioneer this transformation and become the go-to name for car rentals worldwide."
That is real vision language. Directional, aspirational, emotionally resonant. Left there, it is motivating. But it is not a work plan.
What the ICR case study then shows — methodically, step by step — is how that vision becomes five strategic objectives. How those objectives expose specific capability gaps. How those gaps generate bounded initiatives with named owners, defined scope, and measurable outcomes. The unified global mobile app. The regulated autonomous vehicle pilot programme. The AI governance framework for safety-critical services. The technology integration playbook for the European acquisition. The sustainability reporting dashboard embedded in operations.
Not one of those initiatives is arbitrary. Each one traces directly back to a phrase in Max's vision statement. Follow the thread and you can see exactly why each initiative exists, what it is trying to prove, and how you would know it had succeeded.
That traceability — from vision phrase to strategic intent to capability gap to funded initiative with a named owner and a measurable outcome — is what most real organisations do not have. And it is what the translation competency is supposed to produce.
Working through ICR made me ask a question I have not stopped asking since: why is this kind of structured decomposition not a standard part of how we develop senior IT leaders? It is not complex. It is not reserved for strategy consultants or C-suite executives. It is a learnable, repeatable discipline. And almost nobody teaches it.
A Practical Decomposition Framework That You Can Use
The good news is that vision translation is a learnable, repeatable discipline. It is not intuition. It is not seniority. It is a structured thinking process that anyone at director level can apply in an afternoon.
The following approach draws on OKR methodology, Balanced Scorecard logic, and the execution frameworks coming out of Stanford GSB's work on strategy alignment. It is not original theory — it is a practical synthesis of tools that exist but are rarely applied together at the initiative definition stage.
The chain is straightforward:
Step 1 — Write the vision phrase verbatim
Do not paraphrase yet. The exact words matter because they carry encoded intent. "Trusted" and "reliable" are not synonyms in this context. "Future-ready" and "innovative" point to different capability investments.
Step 2 — Extract the strategic intent
For each significant phrase, ask: what would have to be demonstrably true about this organisation for this phrase to be credible to a sceptical external observer? This question converts language into implied organisational requirements. "Customer-centric" implies insight capability, responsiveness infrastructure, and measurement systems. "Trusted" implies security architecture, consistency of delivery, and transparency of data handling. Write those implications down.
Step 3 — Identify the capability gap
For each strategic intent, ask: what do we not currently have, or what do we not have at sufficient maturity? Be honest here. A maturity model lens is useful — whether ITIL CMM8, a Gartner ITScore9, or your own internal assessment. Optimism at this step creates expensive mistakes at the initiative stage.
Step 4 — Define the initiative
Each capability gap should generate one or more bounded initiatives. Each initiative needs a named owner, a defined scope, a timeframe, and a resource implication. If you cannot write the initiative in two sentences with all four of those elements present, it is not specific enough yet. Keep decomposing.
Step 5 — Attach the metric
Every initiative needs at least one outcome metric — what changes in the world if this initiative succeeds — and one leading indicator — how you know you are on track before the outcome lands. OKR discipline is useful: the Key Result must be measurable, time-bound, and not simply a task completed.
Step 6 — Apply the Reversal Test
This is the validation step that most frameworks omit, and the one I find most revealing. Take your initiative. Imagine it has been fully delivered and fully adopted. Now ask: could a neutral observer look at the outcome and reasonably conclude that the original vision phrase is now demonstrably true? If yes, the translation is sound. If the honest answer is "probably, in combination with several other things, depending on how you define it" — the initiative is too indirect, too narrow, or misaligned. Work backwards until the connection is clean.
This reversal logic borrows from benefits realisation methodology but is almost never applied at the initiative definition stage. It is fast, it is low-cost, and it catches misalignment before it becomes a misallocated budget.
Vision Phrase Translation Table
Boardroom language is not deliberately vague — it is designed to be directional without being prescriptive, which is appropriate at that level. The challenge for the IT director is to decode it systematically. The table below is a working reference: ten of the most common vision phrases, what leadership is likely signalling with each, and two concrete IT initiative examples for each. It is not exhaustive, and context always matters. But it gives you a starting vocabulary for the decomposition conversation — which is more than most senior managers currently have.
| Vision Phrase | What Leadership Actually Means | Concrete IT Initiative — Example 1 | Concrete IT Initiative — Example 2 |
| Customer-centric / Superior Experience | Remove friction at every touchpoint; measure what customers actually feel, not what IT assumes they feel | Real-time journey analytics platform with NPS and CSAT embedded at digital touchpoints — not bolted on at year-end | AI-assisted self-service with predictive resolution; shift from reactive support to proactive intervention |
| Future-ready | Build adaptable architecture and workforce capabilities ahead of demand shifts, not in response to them | Cloud-native, API-first platform migration — so new services are integrated in weeks, not quarters | AI/ML capability centre with structured reskilling programme and internal sandbox environments |
| Trust / Trusted | Build and sustain confidence through security, transparency, consistency — and recover fast when things go wrong | Zero-trust security architecture with continuous compliance monitoring and audit trails visible to regulators | Data governance framework with transparent AI decision-logging and a customer data rights portal |
| Leveraging synergies / Transformation | Eliminate duplication, integrate systems, extract value from what you already own before buying something new | Enterprise integration layer to connect legacy and acquired systems — and formally retire shadow IT | Shared services consolidation with unified service catalogue and common tooling across business units |
| Sustainability / Responsible Growth / Human-centric | Align IT operations and product design with environmental, social, and accessibility commitments | IT carbon footprint dashboard; green data centre migration programme; sustainable vendor scorecard embedded in procurement | Accessible-by-design product standards with inclusive UX reviews built into delivery governance |
| Talent / Culture of Excellence | Attract, develop, and retain high performers; make learning a structural habit, not an annual event | Competency framework with certification pathways (ITIL, DevOps, cloud) explicitly linked to career progression and compensation | Internal tech talent marketplace enabling cross-functional mobility — and reducing expensive external hiring |
| Resilient / Operational Resilience | Reduce single points of failure across technology and supply chain before a crisis forces you to | Business continuity and disaster recovery programme with tested runbooks, not theoretical documentation | Critical vendor dependency mapping with dual-source strategies for tier-one services |
| Data-driven / Insight-led | Decisions at every layer informed by real-time data — not by the most senior opinion in the room | Enterprise data platform with self-service analytics; governed, accessible, and trusted by the business | Data literacy programme embedded in onboarding and performance frameworks for all IT leadership roles |
| Agile / Speed to Market | Shorten the cycle from idea to customer value — which usually means removing internal friction, not adding Agile ceremonies | Value stream mapping exercise to expose handoff delays and WIP bottlenecks; flow metrics published monthly | Quarterly portfolio-level prioritisation cadence with explicit WIP limits — replacing annual plan plus ad-hoc requests |
| One Company / Breaking Silos | Reduce duplication and increase cross-functional flow of information, decisions, and resources | Enterprise service catalogue with shared ownership model — so 'not my team' stops being an acceptable answer | Cross-functional product team restructuring with dedicated business relationship managers per domain |
A note on the GCC context specifically: when the vision arrives from a parent organisation, a pre-step is needed before this table is useful. Ask first — what does this phrase mean for our specific delivery context, our customer base, our regulatory environment? The translation is always local. The table gives you the generic starting point; you own the contextualisation.
Where The Framework Strains, and What to Do About It
Any framework that presents itself as universally applicable deserves a paragraph of honest pushback. This one has three conditions under which it strains.
When the vision is internally contradictory. "Customer-first" and "cost reduction" in the same sentence. "AI-led innovation" and "data privacy by design" in a heavily regulated sector. Before decomposing, test the vision phrases for internal coherence. If two phrases pull in genuinely opposite directions, that tension must be surfaced to leadership before you build initiatives — because otherwise you will produce two initiative portfolios that will eventually collide, expensively, mid-programme.
When there is no accountable sponsor. The ICR example works partly because Max has a clear mandate and board backing. In many organisations — particularly where transformation ownership is diffuse or where the CIO role is relatively new — the vision arrives without a single executive who will make a prioritisation call when two translated initiatives compete for the same budget and the same people. If you cannot name that person before you begin the decomposition, the exercise will produce excellent documentation that nobody acts on.
When five directors each translate the same vision in isolation. The translation gap is not only an individual problem. It is a collective coordination problem. Five capable directors each decomposing the same vision phrase independently — without comparing notes — will produce five incompatible initiative portfolios. The three-step practice at the end of this article includes a peer validation step for this reason. Translation done in parallel isolation is not translation. It is creative writing.
Three Things You Can Start This Week
If this has landed, here is a practice that takes less than an hour a week. Within a quarter it will materially sharpen your translation muscle — and make you visibly more useful in the rooms where strategy is set.
This week: Take one phrase from your organisation's current strategy or vision communication. Just one. Write it at the top of a blank page. Then write everything that would have to be demonstrably true about your IT environment for that phrase to be credible to a sceptical external observer. Do not edit. Just generate.
Next week: Walk the most significant item on that list through the decomposition chain. Strategic intent. Capability gap. Initiative — two sentences, named owner, timeframe, resource implication. Then apply the Reversal Test. If the connection from initiative back to vision phrase is not clean, keep decomposing.
The week after: Share the output with one peer at your level — ideally from a different function. Ask them a simple question: if this initiative were fully delivered, would a reasonable person look at the outcome and say the vision phrase is now true? If they say yes immediately, you have done the translation. If they hesitate, you have found your gap before it became someone else's failed transformation.
Repeat with a new phrase each month. What starts as a structured exercise becomes, over time, a reflex — the ability to hear vision language and begin decomposing it almost in real time. That reflex is not taught in most leadership development programmes. It is not formally assessed in most performance frameworks. But it is, in my experience, one of the clearest differentiators between directors who shape their organisation's direction and directors who execute someone else's.
NOTE:
This article was prompted — as the best ones usually are — not by theory, but by a case study that made a familiar problem suddenly, uncomfortably clear.
ICR (ITIL Car Rental) is a fictitious company used as a worked case study throughout the ITIL v5 official curriculum, published by PeopleCert. All ICR references in this article draw from that material.
About Author:
Rajwardhan Purohit is Capability Architect and Evangelist of the Capabilities-as-a-Service (CaaS) framework. With 30+ years in IT delivery and service management, he serves as Global ITIL Ambassador and is associated with Ducis Management Consulting as ITIL Maturity Consultant, Accredited Tool Assessor, and trainer. Views expressed are personal.
This is a technology-assisted write-up. All brands and products named are the property of their respective organisations.